


Violet & Gold

by lazarov



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: M/M, Magic AU, can you imagine anything more pretentious than a magician in head-to-toe saint laurent, coffee shop AU, i mean can you imagine
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-17
Updated: 2016-03-17
Packaged: 2018-05-27 06:45:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6273937
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lazarov/pseuds/lazarov
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry is a magician.  Louis works in a coffee shop.  Their worlds don't so much collide as melt into one another, like crayons in the sun.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Violet & Gold

**Author's Note:**

> i've been staring at this for so long i can no longer tell if it's incredibly stupid or a good idea but sure, here goes.

 

 

Magic tastes like violet.  The flower, yes, but also the colour: somehow soapy and cloying but rich, too, heavy with risk and possibility.  It holds the buzzing headiness of royalty and privileged bloodlines, the very ones he descends from, and it’s intoxicating, really, in all of the very best ways (and the best ways are always both dangerous and exclusive).  

It's not just violet that carries its own tiny galaxy of potential.  All colours, all the way from ugly 70s-carpeting orange to sunset bronze, have tastes, scents, even personalities - intrinsic aspects that are invisible to those without the Touch - and each colour dictates its own use; combine just the right incantation with a fingertip on just the right colour and the possibilities of what you might bring forth into the world are infinite.

Indigo is his favourite: it smells and tastes like cold rain in a pine forest and lets him wave his hands above any ATM and --  _ta-da_.  Admittedly, the Crown doesn't particularly love that trick.  He suspects that they think it sullies their brand, lecturing him about decorum and "stealing" and what-have-you. Pish posh.  A good spell is a good spell, and that one is bloody good.

There aren't many colours he hates; each one is so intricate, so many-layered, that it's difficult to paint any one with a single brush.  But he hates marigold, truly and completely, from somewhere cold and deep inside him.  Marigold always means death, one way or another.

For the essential, everyday spells he keeps tokens with him: a scrap of emerald brocade fabric, made from fine Japanese silk stolen from the chair in his father’s study; a simple solid-gold band, worn on a thin braided chain ‘round his neck; three beads on a leather strand wrapped three times around his wrist, in glinting shades of amber, honey, vermilion.  

For the rest of the colour spectrum he prefers to rely on his surroundings, an inclination gleaned from an old lesson in situational organics from his father that’d stuck with him since he was a child: ‘a spell without fount does not wish to be cast.’ Most with the Touch wear a token with the full spectrum - a steel bangle inlaid with every-coloured enamel, the standard graduation gift from Queensford - but he finds it more romantic to live his life this way, without a thousand spells right at his fingertips.  

Certainly it's a little more difficult, a little more mundane.   _Common_ might even be the right word, but it leaves a strange taste in his mouth (a taste remarkably like that of drab, olive green).  Michael calls it a weakness, a "predilection for the absurd," but that’s bollocks.  

Just because he prefers to drag his fingertips across his surroundings, picking up pigment as though the world were his own personal palette, doesn’t mean that if wore the right rainbow paisley Saint Laurent silk shirt he couldn’t bring down Westminster with a fireball the size of a fucking river bus if he wanted to.


End file.
